A defiant Rick Santorum on Monday defended his weekend attacks on both Mitt Romney over health care and on a New York Times reporter, saying, “If you haven’t cursed out a New York Times reporter during the course of a campaign, you’re not really a real Republican.”

“I just said OK, I’ve had enough of this you-know-what,” Santorum said on “Fox & Friends,” referring to why on Sunday he accused reporter Jeff Zeleny of “bulls——”. “And so that’s what I did and you know, look, we’re out there slugging away … and we’re mixing it up.”

Accusing a Romney aide of having been at the back of the room “spinning” members of the media on Sunday, the former Pennsylvania senator said on Fox News that his point had simply been about his rival’s inability to take on President Barack Obama’s health care reform.

“Gov. Romney of all the people in this party as the person who put the blueprint together for Obamacare is uniquely disqualified to make the argument against Obamacare,” he said.

At a campaign event in Wisconsin over the weekend, Santorum said Romney was “the worst Republican in the country to put up against Barack Obama” because the former Massachusetts governor’s health care law was used as a blueprint for Obamacare.

After his speech, when reporters continued to press him about the statement, an agitated Santorum lashed out at Zeleny, saying, “Quit distorting my words. It’s bull——.”

Zeleny defended his question to the presidential hopeful earlier on Monday to CBS’s Charlie Rose – who himself characterized Santorum’s comments as “a little bit profane” — saying he had simply been “asking for clarification.”

“What he’s trying to do is trying to do is make his case to Republican voters here. It’s a very common tactic for Republican presidential candidates, or even Democratic, to use the media as a foil,” the political correspondent for the Times said on “This Morning,” citing former House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s use of the strategy. “He clearly knew the cameras were rolling here.”

Zeleny added, “He said in his speech, to a room full of supporters, that he believes Mitt Romney is the worst Republican in the country. Health care was not attached to that sentence in his sound bite there, so simply asking him for clarification. And he did, in fact, explain in full there that health care is what he was talking about.”